Digg/Buzz It Up

POLITICO 44

Labor and Southern agriculture, two vested interests important to Democrats in next year’s elections, both stand to gain under Senate committee changes elevating Tom Harkin of Iowa and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas to new chairmanships.

Harkin, a coal miner’s son and strong union man, is the chief beneficiary of Sen. Chris Dodd’s decision not to take over the Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee chairman left vacant after the death of Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. And together with his position already on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the 69-year-old Harkin will have more clout over health and public welfare programs than any senator since the late ’60s.

“It is unique,” Harkin told POLITICO. As part of the bargain, Dodd will retain a leadership role in the health care debate this fall, but Harkin will be positioned to both authorize and fund one of his top priorities: increased health investments in prevention and wellness initiatives.

Lincoln’s rapid rise to chair the Senate Agriculture Committee is also historic and a reminder of the enduring power of Southern cotton and rice interests in the politics of the chamber.

A rice farmer’s daughter, she is the first woman to ever chair the panel. And together with ranking Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, she will head the first all-South Agriculture leadership team since Sens. Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) ruled the roost in the 96th Congress 30 years ago.

Lincoln denied any lasting imbalance, saying that the committee has always worked across party lines to resolve these differences. But the Lincoln-Chambliss team will pose a real challenge for the White House if the Obama administration persists in trying to reopen last year’s farm bill to achieve greater savings.

Rice and cotton interests, with typically high input costs and large land holdings, have always resisted payment limits on farm subsidies. And Lincoln warned Wednesday against tampering with agreements negotiated last year and blessed by a large Senate vote on passage.

“It’s important that we follow through with implementing what we pass,” she told reporters. “I thought it was well-defined in the bill. If [the Agriculture Department is] confused about what our intent was, they should work with us.”

Kennedy, whose nearly half-century career witnessed huge changes in the chamber, might have been amused by the shuffle his death set in motion.

Dodd, his good friend, has been heavily invested in the health care debate but ultimately chose to keep his Banking Committee chairmanship because of the remaining challenge of needed regulatory reforms after last year’s crash. That opened the door for Harkin, who then surrendered his Agriculture post to Lincoln, still in her second term and born just two years before Kennedy came to the Senate.

Even more than Dodd or other potential successors to Kennedy, such as Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Harkin has been closely identified with the labor movement, given his working-class background. His father suffered from black lung, and Harkin is someone who speaks emotionally about the impact of strikes on close relatives. Kennedy, a friend of labor but born into wealth, helped bring Harkin onto the panel after Harkin moved over from the House to the Senate in the mid-’80s. And behind the scenes, Harkin has played an integral role in talks with Democratic moderates in trying to put together the 60 votes needed to move ahead with the union-backed Employee Free Choice, or “card check,” bill.

Labor’s stated goal is to limit the ability of employers to suppress efforts to organize workers, and a compromise is in the works that would drop the initial card check option in favor of simply expedited elections, leaving less time for management to intercede.

Harkin signaled that moving on this front will be very much a priority for him as chairman. “That is in on the burner. That is still on the stove, and it’s still cooking,” Harkin of the card check bill, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney warmly embraced his selection.

Readers' Comments (2)

Even though I hated Harkin when I lived in Iowa, he represented the state to the best of his abilities and no matter how hard we tried to get him out of office the libtards at the big state universities, the teachers union and the state employees kept him in office. It is scary to think that he is going to have so much power for the unions now though.